Saw III

John Kramer, aka the villainous (or is he, really?) Jigsaw (Tobin Bell), takes center stage in this third chapter of the successful series of gruesome morality plays and twisty-turny narrative puzzles. Detectives Mark Hoffman (Costas Mandylor) and Allison Kerry (Dina Meyer) investigate a series of Jigsaw-like murders that reveal themselves to be the work of a copycat killer as there was no hope of escape for the victims; meanwhile, Jigsaw himself is now bedridden with cancer and being kept alive by abducted doctor Lynn Denlon (Bahar Soomekh) long enough for him to oversee the completion of one last “game”: a harrowing series of mental and physical tasks designed to keep Jeff (Angus Macfadyen) from exacting his vengeance on the man who accidentally killed his young son three years earlier. “Saw III” unleashes its many bloody traps with gleeful abandon, though the main focus here is on the twisted and tragic father-daughter relationship between Kramer and Amanda (Shawnee Smith), his young protege, setting the course for the rest of the “Saw” series as a slowly unraveling multi-layered character study (or, perhaps, character “mystery”) of an extremist moral crusader, a man much too complex to be labeled simply as “the bad guy.” – IFC Staff